At a small gallery in Florence, a Peruvian writer comes across a photograph of a tribal storyteller deep in the Amazon jungle. As he stares at the photograph, it dawns on him that he knows this man. The storyteller is not an Indian at all but his university classmate, Saul Zuratas, who was thought to have disappeared in Israel. As recollections of Zuratas flow through his mind, the writer begins to imagine Zuratas' transformation into a member of the Machiguenga tribe.

In The Storyteller, Mario Vargas Llosa has created a spellbinding tale of one man's journey from the modern world to our origins.